British Author Challenge July 2023: Nadifa Mohamed & Tom Holt

Nadifa Mohamed was born in Hargeisa, Somaliland in 1981. In 1986 she moved with her family to London; civil war in Somalia turned what was supposed to be a temporary stay into a permanent move.

Mohamed studied history and politics at St Hilda's College, Oxford. Her first novel, Black Mamba Boy, was published in 2010 and was nominated for several literary prizes, winning the Betty Trask prize. Her two subsequent novels have also received awards.

Works
Black Mamba Boy
The Fortune Men
The Orchard of Lost Souls

As contributor
Reader, I Married Him: Stories Inspired by Jane Eyre
New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent
Africa39: New Writing from Africa South of the Sahara

Tom Holt was born in London in 1961; his mother was crime novelist Hazel Holt.

Holt attended Westminster School, Wadham College, Oxford, and The College of Law, London and worked as a solicitor before he became a full time writer.

While a popular and prolific author of humorous fantasy under his own name, Holt also has an extensive bibliography of works under the pen name K. J. Parker.

Selected works
As Holt
J.W. Wells series
Who's Afraid of Beowulf?
Paint Your Dragon
Nothing But Blue Skies
The Walled Orchard
Expecting Someone Taller
Snow White and the Seven Samurai
Flying Dutch
Only Human
Alexander at the World's End
A Song for Nero

As Parker
Engineer Trilogy
The Fencer Trilogy
Scavenger Trilogy
The Two Of Swords series
Saloninus series
The Siege {Parker} series
Prosper's Demon series
The Long Game
Pulling the Wings Off Angels

>1 amanda4242: Nadifa Mohammed's "Party Girl" story in Reader, I Married Him stood way above the other contributions.

I will look for future novels.

July author deal: Several of Tom Holt's books are on sale from various US retailers.

99 cents:
Expecting Someone Taller
Ye Gods!
Odds and Gods
Falling Sideways

$1.99:
Outsorcerer's Apprentice
Blonde Bombshell

KJ Parker's novelette No Choice is currently available for free from Subterranean Press as a DRM free epub.

https://subterraneanpress.com/parker-nc/

Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohamed

A Somali orphan, Jama, wanders around East Africa and the Middle East in the 1930s and 40s.

I had hoped for much more from this one, but I always felt detached from the characters and events. The book is almost entirely from Jama's point of view, but we rarely get a look at his thoughts or feelings so it feels like he's just there to occasionally glimpse the periphery of some of the most important events of the 20th century. It's not a bad book, but I can't understand why it was nominated for so many prizes.

>6 amanda4242:, I read that one earlier in the year and I am not finding any others in my resources. Maybe nominations are more political than worthy prize winners in an effort to be inclusive. I liked it well enough and gave it 3 stars.

Completed When It's a Jar by Tom Holt; funny SFF about the multiverse. I enjoyed it well enough. It is in a series and I hadn't read the previous books but it didn't seem to matter. It was the only free book I could find. Audible does carry Doughnut.

I read Tom Holt's The Outsorcerer's Apprentice, single note if full of references, mostly meh.

The August thread is up!

https://www.librarything.com/topic/352665